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An anonymous reader writes with this news from Tass: Russia's Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace U.S. microchips (Intel and AMD), used in government's computers, with domestically-produced micro Baikal processors in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday. The article is fairly thin, but does add a bit more detail: "The Baikal micro processor will be designed by a unit of T-Platforms, a producer of supercomputers, next year, with support from state defense conglomerate Rostec and co-financing by state-run technological giant Rosnano.
The first products will be Baikal M and M/S chips, designed on the basis of 64-bit nucleus Cortex A-57 made by UK company ARM, with frequency of 2 gigahertz for personal computers and micro servers."

That might not be a bad target. The Russian space program has a history of reliable but fairly conservative designs, e.g. the Soyuz has a solid multi-decade track record. Versus the American space program, which goes for more cutting-edge stuff like the Space Shuttle, but has more reliability problems.

The shuttles could still be made/maintained/used. They aren't, but that is a financial and political decision. It isn't as though they reached a magic expiration date and crumbled to dust. A new one could be built and used, no problem, if there was the money and will to do so.

No, it does not. He falls prey to conformational bias.
First the difference in number of flights (135 vs 120) is insignificant. Second, first Souyz flew in 1966 (or 1967, don't remember). It did that almost 15 years before the first shuttle flight. Therefore it had to use older technology and do so without much of the experience, technology and knowledge that the designers of the shuttle had. Perhaps it is not coincidence that the 2 losses Souyz had were before the shuttle even took off. Compare this to the shuttle failures.
I think that Souyz is more reliable than the shuttle, but I admit that this is opinion rather than data supported hypothesis since data points are few and unreliable (near misses).

Second, first Souyz flew in 1966 (or 1967, don't remember). It did that almost 15 years before the first shuttle flight. Therefore it had to use older technology

This discussion is not about how great an achievement Soyuz is, and thus virtually your entire comment is irrelevant. The question is about which is more reliable. They have very close records. If you want to discuss irrelevancies, then why not bring up how much more the shuttle could do on a mission than Soyuz? Arguably, the shuttle did much more per flight. By some bullshit metric I could conceive, that would make it safer. But let's just consider the ratio of failed to successful missions, that seems mor

We're safely away from the original topic, so anything flies. Including Soyuz and Shuttle.

When you're talking about reliability of these two crafts, you may talk about "design reliability" or "device reliability". Which design is more reliable? Well, Shuttle has advantage of hindsight, some less drastic loads, and numerically - more flights accomplished. Soyuz has advantage of last death 33 years ago - and of design being constantly tweaked. I.e., Discovery and Atlantis were physically created in 1980-s, wa

We're safely away from the original topic, so anything flies. Including Soyuz and Shuttle.

What? No, no we aren't. You might be, but I'm not going to play that game with you. And on topic, my statement still stands. Why not address it instead of prevaricating? The equipment on the shuttle was also "tweaked" throughout its lifetime, though AFAICT they never made any _major_ changes... but that's not what "tweaked" means.

The point was that Soyuz and Shuttle approach safety from different angles - getting different results. NASA spent greater resources from beneficial historical standpoint, but was unwilling to change significantly later - that's why major design flaws remain unsolved - they are too expensive to solve. Soyuz managed to have a smaller problem space, and, while it flies within that space, and each vehicle is conservatively re-made using all accumulated experience, it's likely to become safer - because on each

The point was that Soyuz and Shuttle approach safety from different angles - getting different results. NASA spent greater resources from beneficial historical standpoint, but was unwilling to change significantly later - that's why major design flaws remain unsolved - they are too expensive to solve.

Sure, I can agree with all of that.

We remain to see what will happen when Soyuz will fly a significantly different mission - like Moon fly-by. May be the simplicity will help and no new failure modes will turn out to be critical. Or may be not.

If you want to discuss irrelevancies, then why not bring up how much more the shuttle could do on a mission than Soyuz?

Well, right now the shuttles can do precisely zero, there are no missions at the various museums they're on display.

They have very close records.

Right. Now we're in fairyland. So far the Soyuz program had 2 crashes, one in its first manned mission (Soyuz 1) in '67 and the other Soyuz 11 in '71. That's about 43 years of no reliability problems, and we're a few generations later - so the reliability of Soyuz 11 is irrelevant for modern missions. Now compare that with the shuttle, which only started test flights in '81 and operational ones in '82. Yeah, it was _designed_ to do more, but that brought about those reliability problems. Of course the shuttle was quite more sophisticated and having it work as well as it did was no mean feat, just ask the Russians how Buran went for them. But in no way the overall reliability is in the same class as the Soyuz. Do few things but do them well works in engineering, be it aeronautics or Unix design.

But let's just consider the ratio of failed to successful missions, that seems more reasonable. By that metric, they are pretty close.

Right. Shall I take your word for it? hmm, let's check it out. Throw in some total mission time since we're at it.

* Space Shuttle: 135 missions (1981-2011), about 1322 days of mission duration, accidents in 1986 and 2003, total casualties 14

* Soyuz, all versions: 122 missions (ongoing since 1967), heck, too lazy to sum up all the days in space but if you only count the flights in the last 4 years you get more than double the Shuttle mission time (Soyuz flights tend to spend about 5 months or more flying, this has been the case with few exceptions for more than 20 years); 2 accidents, '67 and '71, total casualties 4.

So, a couple of accidents in the first 4 years (and 10 manned missions) is totally the same as the shuttle who, after the 2003 accident, still had foam-related scares in 2007, 4 years later.
In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. Feel free to do armchair comparisons to your heart's content though, and do ignore the fact that nobody is building shuttle-type vehicles anymore for... some strange and incomprehensible reasons.

'Reliability' has to also take into account the various failure modes in each of the systems.

The Shuttle was originally designed to be extremely capable, but then the budget crunch came, and they replaced liquid strap-on boosters with solids (with jointed booster casings with seals prone to failure in the cold); the vehicle was not put inline with the boosters (ice damage to the delicate heatshield); there was no crew escape system in the Shuttle; the Shuttle was incapable of flying a Soyuz-style 'ballistic

the Titanic wasn't just a ship that hit an Iceberg, it was a ship lauded as unsinkable because of it's bulk head design and ability to contain leaks to specific damaged compartments thereby maintaining the integrity of it's buoyancy. It's down fall was that building material technology used has not advanced technically to the points of strength and whatever needed for it to be accurate.

We still build ships like that today. There has been reports of some ship

The sister ship of the Titanic, the RMS Olympic, steamed for 24 years before being replaced by the RMS Queen Mary and scrapped and was the largest ocean liner in the world from 1911-1913 (excepting the short reign of the Titanic). The other sister, the HMHS Britannic had the misfortune of meeting a mine. She was larger then the Titanic and benefited from the lessons learned from the sinking of the Titanic (the Olympic also benefited with retrofits) and even though she sank within an hour there was only 30 casualties which I believe includes the occupants of 2 life boats that got munched by the propellers. Would have been much better if all the portholes were closed and a water-tight door hadn't failed, may have been worse if the water had been freezing instead of room temperature.The Titanic was never claimed to be unsinkable, just very safe, the press started the unsinkable BS.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]

That might not be a bad target. The Russian space program has a history of reliable but fairly conservative designs, e.g. the Soyuz has a solid multi-decade track record. Versus the American space program, which goes for more cutting-edge stuff like the Space Shuttle, but has more reliability problems.

The Space Shuttle was a terrible design and a crappy project.

That aside, if this chip project is half as successful as Soyuz (The only operating manned space vehicle in existence) then I think they'll be pretty damned happy about it.

I'd expect them to be a whole lot more 'reliable' than the NSA fiddled with variants. Let's not pretend it is nothing more than that. With a country the size and capability of Russia it would be pretty silly to leave it's essential IT infrastructure reliant on the US, China or the EU. It is a sound logical decision to have all essential IT and communication infrastructure based upon locally built and audited components and if there are any 'er' special features they are theirs and not someone else's. It is

Been saying this for years now since the earliest reports of NSA spying and the cooperation of technology companies came out. Most people kept saying it was nonsense that global trust in US technology can never be lost if only because ours is "the best" and is too expensive to replace. Seems to me that's not a deciding factor these days. The bad behaving US government is causing real harm to business now. As soon as business begins to realize how toxic that relationship is, they will stop doing it. But then again, we still have lots of companies trying to send (outsource) tech to China... China who has a long history of taking the tech and spinning it off on their own. Hoy myopic can they be?

" But then again, we still have lots of companies trying to send (outsource) tech to China... China who has a long history of taking the tech and spinning it off on their own. Hoy myopic can they be?"

I don't mind China (or Russia) taking the tech. I don't mind when they don't give back. A minor example: the many Android variants running on cheap tablets that can't be upgraded because the source code for their non-standard hardware isn't available. (Technically you can upgrade such tablets but you'd lose a l

Not to mention the difficulties of actually producing sufficient quantities of working state of the art processors to replace all those chips from Russian chip foundries.

We Americans do not have a monopoly on smart people or technical know-how. As a matter of fact, for the last 15+ years we have been offshoring much of our high tech manufacturing - it's not just the low tech shit. Intel has been offshoring much of their stuff and I like the idea of karma coming to bite them in the ass.

Russia has LOTS of hard currency and they can buy the best of the best from any company on the planet. So, if they do have a problem, they can just buy someone from Intel, AMD or someone else - or just hire someone that one of those companies canned - I mean "downsized" - what a way to get back at the short sighted-treat people like commodity-corporate assholes.

In other words, I have no doubt that the Russians will be successful - and more power to them. I am looking forward to some advances in microchip technology.

If you were paying the minimum attention to news you would know they licensed the instruction set, but developed a clean room implementation of all the hardware and microcode. Nevertheless, people always fixate on this stupid technical details, and not in debating the big picture, that is the idiocy we are used to in slashdot. And it is rather tiring.

This is logical. They have already replaced Windows with ReactOS in their military systems, according to publicly available photos. Googling for reactos russia" also reveals that the government likely funds the development.

If security for Russian govenrnment computers were my responsibility, I'd be far more concerned about the attack surface being exposed by all the crap software running on top of that processor, rather than the processor itself. Anyway, ARM is a licensed design, not domestic (unless they're planning on engineering a clean-room version for themselves?)

I suppose that chipmaking is a nice thing to have domestically, in case the shit hits the fan, but I suppose if I were serious about increasing cybersecurity, I'd be looking at the systems being run within govenrnment and contractors, make as much of it Open Source as possible (or at the very least, buy source licenses), and then continually audit and patch the crap out of everything. It's hard, boring, unsexy work, and in this case, it doesn't produce cool headlines for the political class, so we get this story instead.

This isn't something serious, just nationalism and/or cronyism. A real domestic processor project? It wouldn't be "dozens of millions of dollars" it would be tens of billions. Intel spent $10 billion on R&D... in 2013 alone. TSMC, who's just a fab not a designer, spent $1.4 billion in 2013.

Semiconductor manufacture is EXPENSIVE. A single modern fab easily tops a billion dollars to build, more like $3 billion. That's just to build it, running it and upgrading it can easily cost that much again over a few years. That is projected to grow to about $15 billion for a high end fab in 2020. All that, and you only have the ability to make chips, you don't actually have any chips to make.

Designing chips is again expensive. You need a bunch of smart, skilled, and experienced engineers and they need to put in a ton of work. It takes years. Companies that do fast design revisions have multiple teams that trade off working on chips, one team will be working on the next gen chip, another team on the gen after that, so that there is enough time to get the designs done.

So if Russia really wanted their own chips, like their own design, their own production, and all that, and wanted said chips to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc, well they'd have to spend a ton of money, and a good amount of time.

This is, as you say, posturing. License an existing core design (made by Western nations), build an older technology fab, and produce some low end chips that aren't really that useful.

So if Russia really wanted their own chips, like their own design, their own production, and all that, and wanted said chips to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc, well they'd have to spend a ton of money, and a good amount of time.

...

All is as you say. But your conditional statement reveals why your argument is irrelevant.

Why do the Russian chips need "to be on the same level as modern chips from Intel, IBM, etc,"? They aren't trying to compete against those companies. They aren't selling them on the open market. They are simply using them of desktop computers and servers in the government, by government purchasing decision.

Commercial processors reached the level that they can fulfill all the real functional needs of the vast majority of desktop applications years ago. A decade old chip running decade old office software can do everything nearly everyone working in an office needs to do as well as the latest and "greatest". Microsoft, Intel, and the PC makers now work in quasi-collusion to force "upgrades" on businesses that do not need them or want them to keep the revenue flowing, but with diminishing success at doing so. Witness the fact that 28% of PCs still run Windows XP [dailytech.com] despite facing the artificial pressure of support termination by Microsoft, and not being able to buy any XP computers for years.

The advantages of using the newest chips have little or nothing to do with supporting the core office functions for which they are purchased - it is to run "eye candy", power saving (not an issue Russia cares about), or applications that actually harm typical office productivity.

The issue is a bit more complicated for servers - but most server applications only require a tiny fraction of modern chip capabilities, which is why high degrees of virtualization are now common. The Russians will have to use more server chips, but each app will still run fine.

"This isn't something serious, just nationalism and/or cronyism. A real domestic processor project? It wouldn't be "dozens of millions of dollars" it would be tens of billions. Intel spent $10 billion on R&D... in 2013 alone. TSMC, who's just a fab not a designer, spent $1.4 billion in 2013."

I won't dispute your figures, but I do find them on the high side.

First, the budget for such a project doesn't need to be spent in one-go. The project can be developed in stages with the money spent being increased

I doubt that a fab could even be built as Russia is on a couple technology transfer lists. When they state Russian made I imagine it will actually be sent to TSMC or other foundry with design in Russia

As far as I know, the Russians didn't buy an entire fab, maybe bought a bunch of used equipment from the Qimonda bankruptcy. You might be referring to AMD spinning off its fabs into Global Foundries, which is now owned by investors in Abu Dhabi. Building a modern semiconductor fab is extremely expensive. The cheapest piece of equipment costs a minimum of $1M. Lithography tools costs over $20M a piece (and you can't just buy one). You're looking at dumping at least $3B into a new fab. The operating costs are

This is global capitalism at its best:-) . Now all the US (and Korean and Chinese and Japanese and...) chip manufacturers have a whole nation of potential new competitors. The New Russia is out to crush all economic competitors! Communism within the borders but Capitalism to conquer the world!

(you can assign your own level of humor, sarcasm, and paranoia to this post.)

Hear me out. The more Countries that turn from American Hardware/Software, the more American Companies will question cooperating with agencies like the NSA. How can that not be good news? unless you care nothing about your rights or the Constitution.

The Russian government has already helped to creat a fairly successful corporation that specializes in Sparc processors named ÐoeÐ¦ÐÐ, or Moscow Center for SPARC Technology
(wiki link in Russian here: http://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... [wikipedia.org]ÐoeÐ¦ÐÐ)
I don't see any reason they would have difficulty doing the same with ARM

Sure using a local design would be the ideal but that would require having a usable local design.

However local production has distinct advantages even if the design is imported. Firstly it makes it harder for other countries to cut off supply. Secondly it means that if a backdoor is to be slipped in it must be slipped in at a much earlier stage of the process making it harder to keep secret. Thirdly it means you are sending less money abroad.

Really Heartbleed was one of the worst security disasters we've had? Based on what? How many exploits were there? What was the financial cost? How long did it remain? How many systems were compromised? There is no indications that it was one of the worst security disasters based on any metric.

Many exploits existed for years and we don't know how long the bad guys had them. That's the nature of the thousands of exploits that come out. All the time you see new exploits dating back to Windows Server 2002. The reason you are so freaked is because you don't know about the others.

As proving stuff you haven't proven anything. You are just asserting. As for Canada it was a teenager trying it out. He didn't do anything. Nothing much happened. The fact that this was the first example that comes to

No. CA's root certificate was never on a publicly accessible server. This was an idea thrown around at the time as an example but the example isn't true. Besides most websites have reissued certificates and most users have gotten the new ones. Most important websites also have additional checks which make man in the middle hard to do. Is somebody somewhere going to get hit? Sure. There is a big target area. But this was an easy to fix problem (though widely spread) and it was addressed quickly and e

The person who wrote the bug has described at length where the bug came from. The source code, and email history at the time obviously supports the very non paranoid origin that it came from a performance tweak to avoid allocating and deallocating memory. There was no NSA involvement.

That's why the OpenSSL cretins had their own weird and 100% insecure heap manager.

I thought C was the main reason why they had their own weird and insecure heap manager? Because the same people who seem to be yelling "never roll your own crypto!" are ignoring the yell of "never roll your own memory management!" from the actual MM-savvy people, GC people, and other similar creatures.

Not C, some weird OS somewhere had a sucky heap manager so they made their own (C just says you'll have something, over the years that something meant something different on different systems). And yea, the OpenSSL people were correct, never roll your own crypto because even a PhD in crypto doesn't really make you qualified in it. With that said, rewriting a known crypto algorithm is mostly fine, the issue OpenSSL had is bad programming, not bad crypto.

Better than revolving their economy around selling things they can find in other people's ground, eh, America?

Seriously, though, Russia's biggest mistake in the past 100 years was Khrushchev's decision to pursue a mission of copying the West rather than developing independently of the West. Lenin was a genius and Stalin was pure evil, but they (especially Stalin) were technocratically brilliant.

The Russians have cloned foreign hardware before, with varying degrees of success. While it will always be one or two generations behind (because you can't reasonably clone something not yet released), their past history would indicate that these will actually work, if they are willing to commit the necessary resources. With there being less and less difference between generations lately, cloning now makes more sense than it did ten years ago. ARM processors themselves were originally cobbled together by a team with plenty of talent but little financial backing, so who's to say a clone can't be done under the same conditions?

You're raising an interesting point: the Russians have historically cloned PDPs and IBM mainframes (mostly for SW reasons, I guess), and they succeeded - sort of, given that their component base was rather limited. But the ARM people you mention did the design they did precisely because their resources (financial, manufacturing, design iterations etc.) were very limited. They gambled everything on simplicity, and it paid off. That wasn't the case with those Russian-built IBMs and PDPs, though. I wonder what would have happened if the Russians hadn't blindly cloned US hardware and gone instead for architectures matched for simplicity, like Novix NC4016 or similar things. It was way faster than anything from Intel at that time, and way more simple, so simple that even Tesla Piestany could have manufactured it (sorry, Slovaks;-)).

They also cloned the Z80, the 8086, the Casio pocket computer, HP calculators, the Apple ][... it wasn't all big iron. Some of it went beyond cloning, to support the Cyrillic character set where it otherwise wouldn't. Aside from the fundamental mistake of using the "metric inch", thus making it impossible to mix and match parts with Western ones, they actually did a reasonably good job on most of it. Some of it still works.

intel fabs are in the U.S. The packaging, the wire bonding. That's done in Malaysia. But you have a point. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, and a number of others have facilities that are quite capable of making high quality high performance processors.

Who is going to slap an embargo on them? Not the UN, Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council. I can't imagine China would vote for that either.What percentage of processors are made in (mainland) China?

Intel makes their stuff in the USA, AMD in Europe and Singapore. I don't know a ton about mainland China's semiconductor industry, but most of the bleeding edge work is done in the US, Taiwan, and Europe.

Not paying attention? Russia is also breaking free of the petro-dollar monopoly. You may not think much of it, but the fact has been that all oil and gas has been traded in US dollars around the globe. That has been one of the reasons US dollars have maintained any value at all. With so much of the US production and even many services going overseas, we simply aren't producing anything here. At least not the way we once did and still can.

I would argue that no one sane right now would push for that much of de-americanisation that fast.

Reality is, you don't want to push a country with military that is more powerful and has more capability to project force over long distance than anyone else in the world to collapse quickly. That has a huge risk of military taking things in their own hands and everyone suffering for it.

If the US should ever "Collapse" who would pay the soldiers? They going to go to work for free? You going to enlist for free?No one is "pushing a country with bla bla bla, look at our fantastic military" you are doing it on your own.

I think that is the problem he was speaking of. Who can stop the US military from taking what it wants and paying the soldiers itself if the US collapses?

So which do you think is more likely to happen, the US military disbands and it's soldiers leave into a country that just fai

Not paying attention? Russia is also breaking free of the petro-dollar monopoly. You may not think much of it, but the fact has been that all oil and gas has been traded in US dollars around the globe. That has been one of the reasons US dollars have maintained any value at all. With so much of the US production and even many services going overseas, we simply aren't producing anything here. At least not the way we once did and still can.

There are nations interested in de-Americanizing the world. I can't say I blame them right now. But as things fail to turn around or get corrected, we in the US are going feel the hurt in ways which are painful to imagine.

I know this is a favorite conspiracy among internet commenters for whatever reason, but the petrodollar conspiracy is a myth. The US dollar has value because it is legal tender in the worlds largest economy. The United States is also the worlds largest manufacturer, surpassing the next five manufacturers combined in total output. It also requires these goods to be sold in dollars. Domestically, the United States also has the largest capital holdings in the world, estimated to be valued in hundreds of trillions of dollars. Since the dollar is legal tender, these capital assets are also valued and traded in dollars. It is also the world's historically most stable currency, making it very attractive for sovereign reserve funds.

That's okay, because economists disagree on cause and effect at the highest levels, as well as the lowest ones. Given that, a high school economics student (honors or not, let's just take "passing" as a given for the scope of this conversation) probably has at least as good a chance to get economics right as anyone else, and probably a lot better than most.

"That has been one of the reasons US dollars have maintained any value at all. With so much of the US production and even many services going overseas, we simply aren't producing anything here. At least not the way we once did and still can."

Military and agricultural exports, nothwithstanding the controversy surrounding GMOs, are still strong.

" As of 2010, the country [the united states] remains the world's largest manufacturer, representing a fifth of the global manufacturing output."Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]

[citation needed] because sadly, your citation does not itself provide a proper citation. It simply links to an entire department of the UN, that is not acceptable. Can you provide a proper citation that explains what "global manufacturing output" means? Does that include things assembled in the USA from foreign parts, like International-Navistar engines with blocks cast in China? The block is the most important part of the engine, to me that motor is at least half-Chinese.

The superiority of certain Russian military systems is old news; I seem to remember some rather middling powers in Europe developing capabilities superior to abovementioned Russian military kit, and it barely making the news. Their SAMs are still rather good though.

Yeltsin was an drink-sodden idiot who made the entire world a worse place. NOBODY in their right mind thinks the world is safer with a weak Russia. And the neoliberal experiment in Russia was nothing more than a massive crime against the Russian people -- you'll get very few arguments from anybody there (I've seen what these arseholes did to Hungary, and it was nowhere near as bad there). But here's where things start to go wrong -- in the Russian popular imagination, the adventures of the Chicago Boys in R

NOBODY in their right mind thinks the world is safer with a weak Russia.

Except people who view Russia in the light of history, and note that when they have too much military might, they tend to project it. The answer to an out-of-control USA ain't a strong Russia, it's to weaken the USA. Making more strong nations just leads to more conflicts and eventually wars.

Putin is a missed opportunity, in that he has the power and a mandate to turn Russia into a normal country, governed by the rule of law. Instead, we have a strong Russia, making a nuisance out of itself everywhere, instead of leading from the front.

Yes, just like every other nation which has amassed enough power to project it, ever.

Unless the elimination of the Pax Americana has the very undesirable effect of countries who have lived for decades under the protection of the US military decide to rearm because the countries that they fear have no check on expansion.

Unless the elimination of the Pax Americana has the very undesirable effect of countries who have lived for decades under the protection of the US military decide to rearm because the countries that they fear have no check on expansion.

I propose that there is a happier middle ground which does not involve the USA playing the role of international bully, simply because it can.

When it came to bleeding edge military technology, USSR was top notch. Don't believe the bullshit propaganda on this one. I recommend starting looking on documentaries made around 1995-2000 many of which can be found on youtube. Back then Russia was opening up to the West and a lot of massive technological marvels that they produced were first seen by the West.

To quote a Lockheed Martin head engineer of space engine program after seeing the test firing of Soviet closed circuit engine which he flat out refused to believe to be possible until that firing:

"Seeing this made us ask some very uncomfortable questions about our research and development processes".

Just like USSR was behind in some things, USA was behind in some other things. And USSR's solution to many parts where it was behind were stunningly brilliant. For example nearly fully automated long range aircraft that was MiG-25 was massively automated and computerized. On vacuum tubes. US and Japanese specialists didn't believe it when they got the thing from Belenko, and there were several documentaries covering the plane and Belenko's case which had some very interesting talking points from engineers working on it.

And after Cold War ended, when asked why, the explanation was that vacuum tubes actually survived extreme conditions of extreme altitude and extreme speed flight much better than transistors, and that it was more efficient to code around their slowness than to burden the aircraft with climate control systems for transistor based computers.

Assuming people like that won't make any breakthroughs is simply stupid.

I would never assume they won't make any breakthroughs but what you're expecting is far beyond "making breakthroughs". You seem to believe a government run research program with a relatively small budget can outperform a multibillion dollar decades old giant of innovation like Intel.
If Russia had three times Intel's budget for the next ten years they could probably catch up. Other than that it's just not happening.

Well... it all depends on their priorities... Either it's "Make the best X we can with Y amount of money" or "Make the cheapest X we can for Y amount of money that we then can sell for Z amount of money so we can finance project Q"

The first option there is probably the best.. And the second part here is that they can probably ignore all the existing patents that covers all this and there by reducing per-unit cost with quite a bit.

When it came to bleeding edge military technology, USSR was top notch. Don't believe the bullshit propaganda on this one. I recommend starting looking on documentaries made around 1995-2000 many of which can be found on youtube.

And after Cold War ended, when asked why, the explanation was that vacuum tubes actually survived extreme conditions of extreme altitude and extreme speed flight much better than transistors, and that it was more efficient to code around their slowness than to burden the aircraft with climate control systems for transistor based computers.

And you believed that? HAHAHA. It was because they physically couldn't make complex, hardened CPUs. They worked with what they had. It's a testament to their brilliance, but not to their ability in war. Once you actually get to the point where you're producing microchips, they just keep getting cheaper the more you make. It does, however, cost a hell of a lot to get there in the first place.

You've been drinking too much Russian kool-aid. Yes, they have great mechanical engineers, as witnesses in the advanced rocket engines, but we're talking about semiconductor manufacturing here (not even semiconductor design, which I'm sure they've historically been much better at than manufacturing). Regarding MiG-25, I think you're mistaken. What exactly was "nearly fully automated and computerized" about it? Was the radar built out of vacuum tubes? Yes! Was it strange for any RF engineer? Hell, no, why sh

I recommend following my advice instead of making these guesses. They make you look rather foolish. You see, they had actual computers on board on vacuum tubes (plane was fly by wire with many automated controls due to extreme conditions it was designed to fly in - they list things like plane rolling and collapsing to the side and then into a downward dive without specific fly by wire programming when launching a missile for example) and it was designed in 1959 and flying in 1969. Not many complex microproc

This is something I haven't understood. Some Russian guy develops a block puzzle game on a Russian clone of a PDP-11, and this clone is the only reason the world has heard of the Electronika brand. Yet he goes lawsuit happy on anyone who clones his game.

Everyone has been trying to build a Silicon Valley with their own people for decades.What they don't get (and the last few US governments don't get) is that Silicon Valley worked because it was about providing opportunities for people from everywhere instead of tightly controlling it.A shining example is the early days of Intel.When the best in the world can, and want to, set up shop instead of merely the best from California or wherever yo

You can't really make a good fist of building your own Silicon Valley, if you close it off to the world, maintain a shallow talent pool, punish mistakes, and don't reward people for success. Which is probably why places like Silicon Roundabout and Silicon Fens are doing better than other attempts to clone Silicon Valley elsewhere.

No matter how many announcements and throwing of cash at the problem (plus rampant corruption) they will not make any breakthrus.

Except for Big Iron (for which they aren't going to be using ARMs, real or clone), they aren't in need of breakthroughs to make usable hardware.

Look at it this way -- say for some strange reason, Apple stopped making new iPhone models, and Samsung and HTC got sued into not doing anything new. Three years from now you're stuck with the same one they make today. It still works. Would that really be so awful? Legally it would suck. Technologically, not so much.

After the Snowden revelations it is now assumed that Intel compromised their CPU's extra instruction sets that are useful for encryption (making things much faster for encrypting things if used). The NSA then has Co's etc. pushed to use this capability via outside experts and "experts" from college's.

Although many are too old to remember, we had this debate in the 90's over the clipper chip (allowed encryption via a chip with a NSA back door) and it was roundly rejected by the American Public - in the